Robert Blake

Robert Blake was on screen as a child before he had a settled name to use. Billed as Mickey Gubitosi and then Bobby Blake, he appears uncredited in I Love You Again in 1940, then in Dakota, The Woman in the Window and Humoresque, and in 1948 as the Mexican boy selling lottery tickets to Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is the child performance most people have seen without knowing whose it was.

The adult career took a long time and then arrived all at once. In Cold Blood, in 1967, gave him Perry Smith, and Blake played him small, wounded and frighteningly plausible, the rare true-crime performance that refuses either to excuse or to sensationalise. Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here made him a hunted Paiute man. Electra Glide in Blue built an entire film around his motorcycle cop, a man who wants to be a detective and cannot get the world to take him seriously. The range was narrow and very deep: men whose smallness is the wound.

Television paid for it. Baretta, from 1975, was the star vehicle, a plainclothes detective with a cockatoo and a lot of improvised patter, and Blake holds a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The work thinned afterwards, through Busting and a late turn as the transit boss in Money Train.

In 2002 he was arrested over the killing of his second wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. A criminal jury acquitted him in 2005; a civil jury found him liable for her wrongful death. He died in 2023, his screen career long finished.